Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 45

Chapter 45

Chapter 45

Aurelia’s POV

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I had the eastern site project spread across my desk in three open folders. The supply radius. The contractor list. The delivery schedule that ended on Friday, the deadline Rieck had set.

My shoulder stung if I reached too far across the desk, so I pulled everything close, and sat in the centre of it with a pen in my hand and felt, for one hour, like a person again.

Then my phone rang.

The name on the screen was one of the project’s investors. A man who had put real money into the eastern site at the start, on the strength of a meeting I had run myself.

“Mr. Avery,” I said. “Good morning.”

“Mrs. Valerius.” His voice was wrong. Already halfway out the door of the conversation. “I’ll be brief. I’m pulling out of the eastern project. My capital comes out at the end of the week.”

The pen stopped in my hand.

“Pulling out.” I kept my voice steady. “Mr. Avery, we’re four days from delivery. Your capital is locked in through completion. Has something happened? If there’s a concern, I can fix it today, in person, whatever you

need.”

“There’s no concern. I’ve got a better offer. A better client. Better terms than I’m getting with you.”

“A better offer from who?”

“That’s not your business, Mrs. Valerius.”

“It is exactly my business. I’m the project lead. If someone’s pulling capital out of a Valerius project four days before delivery, I need to know who and I need to know why. And I’m very good at fixing the ‘why’ if you will give me an hour.”

“There’s nothing to fix.” There was a pause. Almost an apology in it, and then gone. “It’s a better deal. That’s all. I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“Mr. Avery, wait…”

He hung up.

I sat with the phone still to my ear and a dead line in it.

What the hell is going on?

A better offer. A better client. Four days out, with no warning, no complaint, nothing I could argue, because he wouldn’t tell me the one thing I needed to fight it. Someone had reached into my project and pulled out a leg

of the table, they had done it cleanly, and they had done it now, when the table was almost finished.

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Chapter 45

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I gathered the folders, held them against my good side, and went to find my husband.

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Rieck’s office was empty.

Elara wasn’t at her desk. The lights were on and his chair was pushed back from the desk, his jacket was gone, and the room had the feel of a room a man had left in a hurry.

I called him from the corridor.

It rang twice and went to voicemail.

I stood outside his closed office with the folders against my ribs and the dead investor call still ringing in my chest. I didn’t know where my husband was. I didn’t know who had taken Mr. Avery. And the building that had felt like mine an hour ago felt suddenly like a place I had only been allowed to borrow.

After a while, I went home.

The elevator doors opened onto cigar and leather.

Hebvron was in the hallway, his coat already on, the silver cane in his hand, Arnell a step behind him.

“Father,” I said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

He looked at me. The warmth he usually put on for me, the daughter and the hand against the cheek, wasn’t there. He gave me a short nod, the kind of nod a man gave a person he was no longer sure was useful to him, and he moved past me towards the elevator.

“Rest well,” he said flatly before the doors closed behind him.

I stood in the hallway with the folders and the cold space where his warmth usually was. And I knew, the way I always knew, that something had happened in this apartment before I walked into it.

I found Rieck on the white sofa.

He had a glass in his hand. Amber, low, already half gone. There was a bottle on the table in front of him that wasn’t there this morning, and the level in it told me this wasn’t his first glass. Rieck didn’t drink. In all the weeks I had lived in his house I had seen him hold a glass and not touch it more times than I could count. I had never once seen him pour a second.

“Rieck.”

He didn’t look up.

“Rieck, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing”

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16:12 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 45

He lifted the glass, drank, set it down, then reached for the bottle and poured again.

I came and sat on the edge of the sofa beside him and set the folders down.

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